Billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch finally got their way in 2011.
After their decades of funding the American Legislative Exchange Council,
the collaboration between multinational corporations and conservative
state legislators, the project began finally to yield the intended result.

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For the first time in decades, the United States saw a steady dismantling
of the laws, regulations, programs and practices put in place to make real
the promise of American democracy.

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That is why, on Saturday, civil rights groups and their allies will rally
outside the New York headquarters of the Koch brothers to begin a march
for the renewal of voting rights in America.

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For the Koch brothers and their kind, less democracy is better. They fund
campaigns with millions of dollars in checks that have helped elect the
likes of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and Ohio Governor John Kasich.
And ALEC has made it clear, through its ambitious "Public Safety and
Elections Task Force," that while it wants to dismantle any barriers to
corporate cash and billionaire bucks' influencing elections, it wants very
much to erect barriers to the primary tool that Americans who are not CEOs
have to influence the politics and the government of the nation: voting.

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That crude calculus, usually cloaked in bureaucracy and back-room
dealmaking, came into full view in 2011.

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Across the country, and to a greater extent than at any time since the
last days of Southern resistance to desegregation, voting rights were
being systematically diminished rather than expanded.

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ALEC has been organizing and promoting the assault, encouraging its
legislative minions to enact rigid Voter ID laws and related attacks on
voting rights in more than three dozen states.

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With their requirements that the millions of Americans who lack driver's
licenses and other forms of official paperwork go out and purchase
identification cards in order to cast ballots, the Voter ID push put in
place new variations on an old evil: the poll tax.

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"We are in the midst of the greatest coordinated legislative attack on
voting rights since the dawn of Jim Crow," says NAACP President Benjamin
Jealous. "Voter ID laws are nothing but reincarnated poll taxes and liter
acy tests, and ex-felon voting bans serve the same purpose today as when
they were created in the wake of the Fifteenth Amendment guaranteeing
ex-slaves the vote-suppressing voting numbers among people of color."